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Giving Memory Its Due In an Age of License

In the moral universe, especially the one that postdates the Holocaust, remembering is almost always enlisted on the side of good, and forgetting on the side of bad. But in a symposium that ended today titled ''The Claims of Memory,'' held at Boston University over the last few days to celebrate Elie Wiesel's 70th birthday, it was memory's difficult skirmishes -- battles where it has clashed with artistic freedom, morality, fact, writing and sanity -- that were evoked.

Even Mr. Wiesel, whose writing is all about memory, conceded that there may be ''too many memories.'' He added that if he remembered everything he would not be here but rather ''in an institution.'' In the face of so much opposition, memory must fight for survival.

Cynthia Ozick, the novelist and critic, addressed the threat of literature, particularly the historical novel, poses to memory. ''The aims of the imagination,'' she said, ''are not the aims of history.''

So how can one object to a novel that distorts events? She made an example of William Styron's novel ''Sophie's Choice.'' The problem? The vast majority of the victims of the Holocaust were Jews, but ''Sophie's Choice'' is about a Polish Catholic victim. So what? ''Why must a writer's character be representative of the statistical norm?'' she asked. No reason, she answered -- unless it is the novelist's intention to ''put flesh on history.'' The term historical novel she said, is an oxymoron. Since Sophie's story stands in for history, ''the rights of history can begin to urge their own force'' over the rights of the imagination.

Ms. Ozick raised the same problem with ''The Reader,'' a novel by Bernhard Schlink whose narrator belongs to the second generation of Germans born after the Holocaust. The novel involves an illiterate woman who, because she could not read an advertisement for a factory job, ended up instead as an SS guard. The woman's illiteracy is used, Ms. Ozick said, to exculpate her. Furthermore, she said, this woman is an anomaly: after all, most Germans in power were far from illiterate. An anomaly like this, Ms. Ozick said, ''sweeps away memory.'' She cannot be excused, even in the name of literary freedom.

Memory must be preserved because it may be the only redress for the victims. ''It comes out of seeming nowhere from the country of the dead,'' Ariel Dorfman said, ''and bites back'' at the villains who think they can erase history. But what happens when villains keep the memories? Mr. Dorfman, a novelist, poet and journalist, recalled District 6, a multiracial, multireligious neighborhood in Cape Town that was so offensive to the officials upholding apartheid that they bulldozed it. There was nothing left but barren fields and a few churches (which the Government always spared). But once Nelson Mandela came to power, said Mr. Dorfman, a museum was built on the site of District 6, which included the street signs from the neighborhood. How did they survive?

The foreman of the wrecking crew had taken the signs home and saved them. The man who razed the neighborhood knew, Mr. Dorfman concluded, that ''he was destroying something sacred,'' and that, he added, stirred him enough to ''become the guardian of that space.'' This reminds us that memories are kept not only by the victims but also by the persecutors. Even villains seem to know that ''there must be a space where memories can resonate.''

And even victims can turn on their own memories. The novelist Aharon Appelfeld recalled his erasure of memory and its eventual retrieval. At the beginning of the war, he said, he tried to preserve the details of his home, to imagine each room, each corner, separately. But during the war, ''we tried to forget we came from Jewish homes.'' He changed his appearance so he wouldn't look Jewish. ''I washed my tongue so that Jewish words should not slip from my mouth.'' He added, ''Memory was our enemy.''

At age 8, he was taken to a concentration camp, then escaped. After the war, he found himself in a refugee, or liberation, camp. But the atmosphere was oppressive. After days of ''quarrels over every inch of space,'' he escaped once more, with a few others. Then memory came back to him unexpectedly. It was nature -- ''contact with the trees in the forest, with the moist earth, the straw'' -- that brought him to his senses and returned memory to him. He described it as a religious awakening.

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''For the first time, we felt that we were individuals -- bereft individuals, but people who had not lost their humanity,'' he said. When memory came back to us, it was ''like reattaching to your body organs which were cut off.'' His parents and grandparents spoke to him in ''a long and colorful dream.'' It was only when memory was no longer a danger to survival, nor occluded by the hopeful clamor of the liberation camp, that it resurfaced. ''Weeks of seclusion redeemed us from our forgetfulness,'' he said.

One might assume that memory has a solid ally in memoir, but some of the speakers were doubtful. Shlomo Breznitz, a psychology professor at the New School University in Manhattan, who studies stress, spoke about writing ''Memory Fields,'' his memoir of being placed in an orphanage with his sister when his parents were taken to Auschwitz. ''We were hungry, but we were not starving,'' he recalled. ''We were cold, but we were not freezing. We were alone, but we still had hope that our parents would come back. Nothing at all compared with with the big drama and the tragedies.''

Still, he said, he needed a half century of reflection before he could write. And even with a long delay, there was a cost to telling the story -- a cost to memory itself. After telling the story, he said, ''I remember the way I told it, not the way it happened. It is something which has a beginning, a middle and an end. The original is covered hopelessly by the reproduction. Once we write it, it is frozen forever.''

Of course, not everyone agrees. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of the Afro-American studies department at Harvard University, found that his memoir, ''Colored People,'' continued to unfreeze memories long after he thought he had finished writing them. As a 12-year-old, he once crossed his legs right over left rather than left over right and dared God to do something about it. Soon after, his mother told him she was going to die. She went to the hospital. He told God that if his mother lived, he'd give his life to Christ. When his mother came back from the hospital, Mr. Gates started going to church. So, after writing his memoir decades later, he finally figured out why he joined the church as a boy.

Mr. Gates thinks that memoirs not only free personal secrets but family and race secrets too. In the business of testifying, he does not think there should be any rules or limitations. ''Bill Styron wrote about Nat Turner,'' and that's fine, he said. A former speechwriter for Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama wrote ''The Education of Little Tree'' pretending to be a Cherokee. And that, to Mr. Gates, is remarkable. ''I love the confusion of forms, the blurring of boundaries,'' he said. ''I love the fact that people can't tell whether some 18th-century work is a memoir or a novel.''

Some do not love such confusion. Susan Suleiman, the chairwoman of the Romance language and literature department at Harvard University and the author of a memoir, ''Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook,'' spoke about the ''institutional boundary'' between fiction and nonfiction. It is notable, she said, that it can really only be violated in one direction: ''If a memoir is felt to be fraudulent, there are shock waves,'' especially if the events described are traumatic. If a novel turns out to be a memoir, she said, people don't care as much.

''I don't think there should be limits on what one can do with the Holocaust'' in literature, she said. But, she added, ''I think the category of memoir implies a kind of contract.''

And so memory battled on through the symposium, with Mr. Wiesel's recurring message as its best ally: ''Memories, even painful memories, are all we have. In fact, they are the only thing we are. So we must take very good care of them.''